The issuance of gift certificates has long been a useful way for merchants to increase sales and for customers to provide gifts to other persons. The receiving persons can then redeem the certificates for desired goods and/or services at the merchants who issued the gift certificates. A drawback to this process has been the inconvenience of having to purchase the certificate at a point-of-sale (POS) terminal at the merchant's location. This process often involves waiting for a sales person to become available before the certificate can be purchased and recorded in the merchant's POS system.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,652,421 to Veeneman et al. discloses a method and apparatus for generating gift certificates, which provides a kiosk through which a customer may purchase a gift certificate with a credit card. The customer can choose a merchant and a gift certificate value, and the kiosk prints and dispenses the certificate, and notifies the merchant. However, Veeneman still has several shortcomings. First is the large size of the kiosk, which limits its mobility and the number of places where it can be installed. Second, merchants today desire to use plastic programmable gift cards, similar in appearance to credit cards, and Veeneman is only capable of printing paper certificates. Third, Veeneman does not perform any kind of inspection to validate whether the gift certificate printed correctly. Thus, problems may arise if the customer did not receive a properly printed certificate, but was charged for it anyway.
It would be advantageous to have a method and apparatus for generating and dispensing gift cards that overcomes the shortcomings of existing gift certificate systems. The present invention provides such a method and apparatus.